General

How to Start a Developer Relations Program

Dec 6, 2022

4 min read

Developer Relations (DevRel) is a role that’s often misunderstood, undervalued and underrepresented. Some think it's just a marketing department, while others believe it's solely responsible for developer relations. In fact, DevRel is a key part of your company's product team and should be involved at every stage of the product lifecycle—from inception through launch and beyond.

The goal of this article is to help you understand the basics you need to start a DevRel program so you can hire the right people, build an effective team structure, measure success, and report on it effectively.

What is developer relations?

Developer relations (DevRel) is a cross-functional role focused on building relationships with developers, who are users of your product. DevRel plays a critical role in helping teams build and promote their products, by providing support and advocacy for developers.

A DevRel team may also be responsible for enforcing developer guidelines, building examples or integrations into your product, or curating content about your product or platform. All of these combined help create a great and sustainable developer experience.

How does DevRel fit into your organization?

Simply put, DevRel is a strategy and set of tactics that can be used to launch products and platforms aimed at developers. DevRel is not a replacement for product marketing and community management—it's an extension of both, and usually overlaps with these two other practice areas quite often. In smaller organizations, you may have a team doing all three simultaneously!

Nevertheless, any DevRel team should be focused on keeping developers engaged in your product throughout its lifecycle.

While many companies have developer relations teams, many companies also do not do so intentionally. Some DevRel focused team members may have started out as developers, community managers, or even customer success managers who did outreach to developers on their own initiative.

The DevRel role has also been known as Developer Outreach or Developer Marketing; some companies use these terms interchangeably with DevRel. Regardless of what name you choose for this function at your company (or if you choose none), remember that the job is fundamentally about relationships: engaging with people who are interested in your technology through communication channels such as events, blogs/forums/discord/slack/social media accounts, github, etc.

When should you start building a devrel team?

You should start building a developer relations team when you have a product or platform that is ready to launch and you have a clear strategy for how to launch the product. You should also be able to answer the following questions:

Who is your target audience?
What does your product do?
How does your product work?
What goals are you trying to achieve?

If you don’t have a clear answer to these questions, then you need to figure out the answers before you start building a developer relations team.

A DevRel person can help you refine how a customer learns about your product, where they can learn more about it (building out developer onboarding experiences), and help you refine the strategy to create a more cohesive developer experience for increased stickiness and adoption.

How do you measure success and report on devrel?

You can create metrics to measure the success of your devrel program, but you should also keep in mind that it's important not to get too hung up on numbers. When you're tracking impact, it's easy to obsess over data; however, there are other important factors that need to be considered as well.

For example, if your developer relations team has been working hard for months and has acquired only a few new customers, that is still worth celebrating because it takes time to build community! You cannot force community and community adoption. It is something that grows with time.

When starting, and throughout your devrel program, you want to measure the success of your devrel efforts by looking at more top of the funnel metrics like how many people are visiting or downloading your public-facing content, your social media profiles, and communities. How much value are they getting from your content? Focus on providing value, because consequently, if developers find your content and product/ platform valuable, they will share those links.

You should also do competitor research and general industry research in your specific niche and create a baseline! How often are product updates being shared by influencers? How are other products getting developer adoption? These metrics will help give you an idea of what works best for your particular industry. The key is experimenting with different ways of gathering data until something sticks!

Conclusion

At the end of the day, developer relations is a complex field that can be difficult to understand. But, it’s also not rocket science. It requires an understanding of the market, best practices, and most importantly, authenticity. Luckily, there are many resources out there to help you learn more about it! If you’re interested in learning more about devrel and how it can benefit your company as well as your customers, take a look at some of our favorite articles:

Defining a career path for Developer Relations by Bear Douglas, Developer Advocacy Lead at Slack
What Is Developer Relations? by Justin Warren for Forbes
What is developer relations? Understanding the 'glue' that keeps software and coders together by Owen Hughes for ZDnet
What is Developer Relations by Sam Julien
What is Developer Relations? by Kim Maida

We also help with this at This Dot! If you’re interested in learning more about our developer relations program, send us an email anytime! tracy@thisdot.co or sarah@thisdot.co!

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Tracy Lee

Partner, This Dot Google Developer Expert (Angular, TC39, Web) RxJS Core Team & Lead for RxJS Learning Team Contributor to Angular, RxJS, EmberJS

Key Strengths:

Teaching developer relations strategies
Influencer marketing
Developing brands
Community strategies and maintenance
Creating product launch strategies
Leading marketing operations efforts & standards
Effective conference presence & speaking strategies

@ladyleet @ladyleet

Overview of the New Signal APIs in Angular

Overview of the New Signal APIs in Angular Google's Minko Gechev and Jeremy Elbourn announced many exciting things at NG Conf 2024. Among them is the addition of several new signal-based APIs. They are already in developer preview, so we can play around with them. Let's dig into it, starting with signal-based inputs and the new matching outputs API. Signal Based Inputs Discussions about signal-based inputs have been taking place in the Angular community for some time now, and they are finally here. Until now, you used the @Input() decorator to define inputs. This is what you'd have to write in your component to declare an optional and a required input: ` With the new signal-based inputs, you can write much less boilerplate code. Here is how you can define the same inputs using the new syntax: ` It's not only less boilerplate, but because the values are signals, you can also use them directly in computed signals and effects. That, effectively, means you get to avoid computing combined values in ngOnChanges or using setters for your inputs to be able to compute derived values. In addition, input signals are read-only. The New Output I intentionally avoid calling them signal-based outputs because they are not. They still work the same way as the old outputs. The Angular team has just introduced a new output API that is more consistent with the latest inputs API and allows you to write less boilerplate, similar to the new input API. Here is how you would define an output until now: ` Here is how you can define the same output using the new syntax: ` The thing I like about the new output API is that sometimes it happens to me that I forget to instantiate the EventEmitter because I do this instead: ` You won't forget to instantiate the output with the new syntax because the output function does it for you. Signal Queries I am sure most readers know the @ViewChild, @ViewChildren, @ContentChild, and @ContentChildren decorators very well and have experienced the pain of triggering the infamous ExpressionChangedAfterItHasBeenCheckedError or having the values unavailable when needed. Here is a refresher on how you would use these decorators until now: ` With the new signal queries, similar to the new input API, the values are signals, and you can use them directly in computed signals and effects. You can define the same queries using the new syntax: ` Jeremy Elbourn mentioned that the new signal queries have better type inference and are more consistent with the new input and output APIs. He also showcased a brand new feature not available with the old queries. You can now define a query as required, and the Angular compiler will throw an error if the query has no result, guaranteeing that the value won't be undefined. Here is how you can define a required query: ` Model Inputs Jeremy and Minko announced the last new feature is the model inputs. The name is vague, but the feature is cool—it simplifies the definition of two-way bindings. Until now, to achieve two-way binding, you would have to define an input and an output following a given naming convention. @Input and @Output had to be defined with the same name (followed by "Change" in the case of the output). Then, you could use the template's [()] syntax. ` ` That way, you could keep the value in sync between the parent and the child component. With the new model inputs, you can define a two-way binding with a single line of code. Here is how you can define the same two-way binding using the new syntax: ` The html template stays the same: ` The model function returns a writable signal that can be updated directly. The value will be propagated back to any two-way bindings. Conclusion The new signal-based APIs are a great addition to Angular. They allow you to write less boilerplate code and make your components more reactive. The new APIs are already in developer preview, so you can start playing around with them today. I look forward to seeing how the community will adopt these new features and what other exciting things the Angular team has in store for us, such as zoneless apps by default....

Apr 3, 2024

3 mins

AngularJavaScript

How to create and use custom GraphQL Scalars

How to create and use custom GraphQL Scalars In the realm of GraphQL, scalars form the bedrock of the type system, representing the most fundamental data types like strings, numbers, and booleans. As explored in our previous post, "Leveraging GraphQL Scalars to Enhance Your Schema," scalars play a pivotal role in defining how data is structured and validated. But what happens when the default scalars aren't quite enough? What happens when your application demands a data type as unique as its requirements? Enter the world of custom GraphQL scalars. These data types go beyond the conventional, offering the power and flexibility to tailor your schema to precisely match your application's unique needs. Whether handling complex data structures, enforcing specific data formats, or simply bringing clarity to your API, custom scalars open up a new realm of possibilities. In this post, we'll explore how to understand, create, and effectively utilize custom scalars in GraphQL. From conceptualization to implementation, we'll cover the essentials of extending your GraphQL toolkit, empowering you to transform abstract ideas into concrete, practical solutions. So, let's embark together on the journey of understanding and utilizing custom GraphQL scalars, enhancing and expanding the capabilities of your GraphQL schema. Understanding Custom Scalars Custom scalars in GraphQL extend beyond basic types like String or Int, allowing data to be defined, validated, and processed more precisely. They're instrumental when default types don't quite capture the complexity or specificity of the data, such as with specialized date formats or unique identifiers. The use of custom scalars brings several benefits: * Enhanced Clarity: They offer a clearer representation of what data looks like and how it behaves. * Built-in Validation: Data integrity is bolstered at the schema level. * Flexibility: They can be tailored to specific data handling needs, making your schema more adaptable and robust. With this understanding, we'll explore creating and integrating custom scalars into a GraphQL schema, turning theory into practice. Creating a Custom Scalar Defining a Custom Scalar in TypeScript: Creating a custom scalar in GraphQL with TypeScript involves defining its behavior through parsing, serialization, and validation functions. * Parsing: Transforms input data from the client into a server-understandable format. * Serializing: Converts server data back to a client-friendly format. * Validation: Ensures data adheres to the defined format or criteria. Example: A 'Color' Scalar in TypeScript The Color scalar will ensure that every color value adheres to a valid hexadecimal format, like #FFFFFF for white or #000000 for black: ` In this TypeScript implementation: * validateColors: a function that checks if the provided string matches the hexadecimal color format. * parseValue: a method function that converts the scalar’s value from the client into the server’s representation format - this method is called when a client provides the scalar as a variable. See parseValue docs for more information * serialize: a method function that converts the scalar’s server representation format to the client format, see serialize docs for more information * parseLiteral: similar to parseValue, this method function converts the scalar’s value from the client to the server’s representation format. Still, this method is called when the scalar is provided as a hard-coded argument (inline). See parseLiteral docs for more information In the upcoming section, we'll explore how to incorporate and validate these custom scalars within your schema, ensuring they function seamlessly in real-world scenarios. Integrating Custom Scalars into a Schema Incorporating the 'Color' Scalar After defining your custom Color scalar, the next crucial step is effectively integrating it into your GraphQL schema. This integration ensures that your GraphQL server recognizes and correctly utilizes the scalar. Step-by-Step Integration 1. Add the scalar to Type Definitions: Include the Color scalar in your GraphQL type definitions. This inclusion informs GraphQL about this new scalar type. 2. Resolver Mapping: Map your custom scalar type to its resolver. This connection is key for GraphQL to understand how to process this type during queries and mutations. ` 1. Use the scalar: Update your type to use the new custom scalar ` Testing the Integration With your custom Color scalar integrated, conducting thorough testing is vital. Ensure that your GraphQL server correctly handles the Color scalar, particularly in terms of accepting valid color formats and rejecting invalid ones. For demonstration purposes, I've adapted a creation mutation to include the primaryColor field. To keep this post focused and concise, I won't detail all the code changes here, but the following screenshots illustrate the successful implementation and error handling. Calling the mutation (createTechnology) successfully: Calling the mutation with forced fail (bad color hex): Conclusion The journey into the realm of custom GraphQL scalars reveals a world where data types are no longer confined to the basics. By creating and integrating scalars like the Color type, we unlock precision and specificity in our GraphQL schemas, which significantly enhance our applications' data handling capabilities. Custom scalars are more than just a technical addition; they testify to GraphQL's flexibility and power. They allow developers to express data meaningfully, ensuring that APIs are functional, intuitive, and robust. As we've seen, defining, integrating, and testing these scalars requires a blend of creativity and technical acumen. It encourages a deeper understanding of how data flows through your application and offers a chance to tailor that experience to your project's unique needs. So, as you embark on your GraphQL journey, consider the potential of custom scalars. Whether you're ensuring data integrity, enhancing API clarity, or simply making your schema a perfect fit for your application, the possibilities are as vast as they are exciting. Embrace the power of customization, and let your GraphQL schemas shine!...

Apr 10, 2024

5 mins

GraphQLJavaScript

How to Provide Value to Your Organization in a Developer Relations Role

A few years ago, a multi-billion dollar corporation we all know and love hired what could be perceived as every developer with Twitter influence on the market into a Developer Relations role. Suddenly, everyone you spoke to worked at the said corporation. While many of us were excited to see the value of Developer Relations recognized by a prominent tech organization, many were also left scratching their heads at the alignment, or lack thereof, between what those hired Developer Relations professionals did to “evangelize or build” and how it related to their employer. A majority of those DevRel professionals were not even creating value in communities related to that organization’s products. An insider look will tell you that the reason is that those hired were just told to “keep doing what they were doing” and not given any additional direction or focus outside of that. Without clearly defined expectations, DevRel professionals cannot provide value to your organization. This is not sustainable and no one wants this. Below is a list of four ways that those in developer relations can deliver value to their organizations. Aligning with your Organization's Goals and Objectives DevRel professionals recognize that all activities should be tangentially related to providing value to the organization and ensure that these activities contribute to the organization's goals and objectives. The best way to align DevRel efforts with organizational goals is to make sure you understand what the strategic objectives of your organization are. Is it product awareness? Is it customer satisfaction? Is it revenue growth? Is it pushing new concepts in a market? Is it fostering innovation? Depending on the objective, you will be able to better tailor your DevRel efforts to the organization. Product Awareness as a Goal For example, if the current goal of the company is product awareness, Developer Evangelism is the best way to provide value. Twilio is still the canonical example of evangelism done right. In the beginning, Twilio needed to spread awareness of their product, and show developers how easy it was to use. They did this by showing up at events with developer-centric swag, creating the best tutorials for developers to follow, giving workshops on how to use Twilio APIs, giving talks about how to use Twilio, and creating a strong community of Twilio adopters that shared their use cases around the internet. Through this, the perception was that Twilio was the best solution, and considered the easiest, most obvious tool choice to use when developers were trying to build unique communication features and capabilities like voice, text, chat, video, and email into their applications. Customer Satisfaction as a Goal If the organizational goal is customer satisfaction, then Developer Community and Developer Experience are the two areas a DevRel professional should key in on. By building a community and creating customer feedback loops where developers can share struggles, and their issues can be heard and resolved directly by engineers and product in a quick manner, customer satisfaction will increase because you are helping solve the pain points of using the product. Creating a community allows other developers adopting the product to bond and share solutions in an open forum. Currently, most organizations choose Discord as a way to engage developers and build community. As a DevRel professional, you are in a unique position to help with the Developer Experience in a way that engineers may not be able to. For example, the customer satisfaction metrics may be affected by a lack of documentation, which can easily be solved by improving the documentation where you see the pain points. This does not require engineering or product to get involved and can often solve developer problems overnight. There may be an issue with the migration of one technology to another. Many Developer Relations professionals have built excellent migration tools to help developers ease this pain. Having the flexibility to work outside of the product roadmap and engineering sprints can serve as an invaluable resource for organizations and serving their needs, and the needs of their users. Revenue Growth as a Goal If the goal for your organization is revenue growth, then helping get developers into the top of the sales funnel is key to providing value to your organization. This does not have to be done in a way that compromises the other principle of DevRel or the core value either. One example I’ll bring up again is Test Automation University by Applitools. By providing a free resource that was able to garner the interest of over 150,000 developers through a DevRel initiative (shout out to Angie Jones for leading this initiative), Applitools was able to collect the email addresses of all these individuals and engage them. Since our focus is DevRel and contributing to the top of the funnel, I won’t speak to the “right way” sales or marketing should engage these developers, but I will say it is critical for DevRel to educate and advocate for marketing and sales to engage with these developers the right way that does not erode brand trust. Delivering Value to Your Organization Delivering value to an organization while upholding the core value of authenticity is not difficult. The hardest part is advocating internally to stakeholders within the organization on the approach to developers and helping them understand the “why” behind the DevRel strategy you are employing. Balancing authenticity and providing value to both the community and to organizations allows DevRel professionals to thrive and achieve mutual success for both developers and the organizations they support. Through living these core values and principles, Developer Relations is the way to forge a path of innovation, collaboration, and long-term success in the technology....

Mar 8, 2024

4 mins

DevRel

Improving INP in React and Next.js

Improving INP in React and Next.js In one of my previous articles, I've explained what INP is, how it works, and how it may affect your website. I also promised you to follow up with more concrete advice on how to improve your INP in your favorite framework. This is the follow-up article, where I'll focus on how to improve your INP score in React and Next.js. How to prepare for INP in React and Next.js? The first thing to do is to ensure you're using the latest version of React. The React team has been working on making React more INP-friendly and has already made some improvements in the latest versions. To enhance your INP score, consider fully taking advantage of new features introduced in React 18, such as Concurrent Rendering, Automatic Batching, and Selective Hydration. However, there are also some general areas to focus on, such as SSR and SSG in Next.js, Web Workers, or optimizing your hooks and state management. Concurrent Rendering The Concurrent Mode in React uses an algorithm that breaks rendering down into so-called "fiber nodes" and schedules the renders based on their expiration and priority. This effectively allows the user to interact with the page while the rendering is still in progress. In previous React versions, all updates, such as setState calls were treated as "urgent" and once the re-render had started, there was no way to interrupt it. Concurrent Mode changes this by being able to prioritize the updates and interrupt a non-blocking state update started with startTransition. For a simple explanation of concurrency in React, you can check out Dan Abramov's explanation. As part of the Concurrent Mode, React introduced several lifecycle methods that allow you to prioritize the rendering of certain parts of your UI, such as: - useTransition hook that allows you to update the state without blocking the UI, - useDeferredValue hook that allows you to defer the rendering of certain parts of your UI, - startTransition API that, similarly to the useTransition hook lets you mark a state update as non-blocking. It lacks, however, an indication of whether it's still pending. Automatic Batching Introduced in React 18, Automatic Batching reduces the number of re-renders that happen on state changes even when they happen outside of event handlers, e.g. in a setTimeout or Promise callback. This feature comes out of the box and you don't have to do anything to enable it, and it makes a great argument for upgrading to React 18. Selective Hydration Selective Hydration allows you to take hydration off the main thread by wrapping your components in a Suspense boundary. This way, components can become interactive faster as the browser can do other work on the main thread while the hydration is happening. To fully take advantage of selective hydration, consider the following: - Prioritizing Above-the-Fold Content: Use Suspense boundaries strategically around any parts of your application that may take the server longer to deliver to ensure they don’t block critical content from becoming interactive as soon as possible. - Hydration on Interaction: Implementing hydration upon user interaction for non-critical components can drastically reduce the main thread's workload, enhancing INP. Vercel even has a small case study showing how using selective hydration improved the performance of a Next.js site. Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) in Next.js Not everything has to run client-side. Next.js excels in SSR and SSG capabilities, which can significantly impact INP by delivering content to users faster. Optimizing SSR with techniques like incremental static regeneration (ISR) or leveraging SSG for static pages ensures that users can interact with content faster, improving the perceived performance. Workers Offloading heavy computations to Web Workers can free up the main thread, enhancing the responsiveness of React and Next.js applications. This strategy is especially useful when dealing with third-party scripts. Offloading such scripts in Next.js can be easily done by specifying the "worker" strategy on your Script component. Be aware that this feature is not yet stable and does not work with the app directory, though. If you want to take things one step further, you could use Partytown, which helps you offload any resource-intensive scripts to Web Workers. It comes with a React component that you can use to wrap your third-party scripts and offload them to a Web Worker, and it's compatible with Next.js as well. Hooks and State Management State management in React applications can easily get out of hand, leading to unnecessary re-renders and effectively an increased INP. Sometimes, using a state management library like Redux or MobX can help you consolidate your state and reduce the number of re-renders. However, they are not silver bullets and can also introduce performance issues if not used properly. If you are dealing with a lot of re-renders due to prop changes, make sure you are leveraging memoization. As of now, you may need to work with useMemo and useCallback hooks to memoize your values and functions, respectively. The upcoming React 19’s Forget Compiler, however, will apparently memoize everything under the hood, making these hooks obsolete. Using memoization properly can help you reduce the number of re-renders and improve your INP. To investigate your hook dependencies and re-renders, you can leverage React Developer Tools or use this handy helper hook I found on the internet to trace your re-renders: ` Conclusion Improving INP in React and Next.js is not easy and can require much investigation and fine-tuning. Still, it's worth doing to avoid being penalized by Google in its search results and provide a better experience for your users. Adopting React 18's new features, leveraging SSR and SSG in Next.js, utilizing Web Workers, and optimizing hooks and state management can significantly boost your INP score and deliver a faster application to your users. Remember, INP is just one among many performance metrics emphasizing the need for a comprehensive approach to performance optimization...

Apr 19, 2024

5 mins

Web PerformanceReactNextJSJavaScript

How to Start a Developer Relations Program

What is developer relations?

How does DevRel fit into your organization?

When should you start building a devrel team?

How do you measure success and report on devrel?

Conclusion

Tracy Lee

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Overview of the New Signal APIs in Angular

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Improving INP in React and Next.js